I would gladly join the ship-breaking industry in Alang and risk dying of asbestos poisoning instead of watching The Nice Guys at any Indian cinema. This, despite the raving reviews in the West because our generation's cultural arbiter-in-chief, Pahlaj Nihalani, decided to sanitise this supposedly full-on blast of a movie set in the porn industry of late-seventies Los Angeles. This person threatens to do the same to what looks like the most exciting Hindi film of the year: Udta Punjab. Thankfully, the censor board chiefs in the regional cinema are exuding some sort of sanity. Here are the three movies I watched over the last fortnight:
A Aa: One of the biggest tragedies wrought upon filmlovers post-2000 is that except those who speak Telugu, anyone else would find it hard to appreciate the writing genius of Trivikram Srinivas. This man is single-handedly responsible for raising the collective IQ of the Telugu audience through his rooted witticisms and acute insight on human condition. Any admirer of brilliant commercial cinema is missing out on truckloads of epic joy if she doesn't watch Athadu and Khaleja (the most engrossing first half of Indian cinema after Dil Chahta Hai).
His latest offering, starring Nithin and Samantha, is nowhere near his best but it's been such a fallow summer for the twin states that this shopworn movie about two cousins coming together by breaking class barriers is making waves at the box office. The movie does have its sparkling moments but they are intermittent. A track called "Mummy Returns" is one of the most brilliantly conceived sequences I have seen on screen lately. There are these trademark punches that he throws that are equal parts goofball and spoonful-of-sugar-coated-satire, which tells us that as a writer he's in pristine form, but as a film maker he's short of ideas.
U Turn: Kannada film maker Pawan Kumar's debut feature, Lucia, was so terrific and ahead-of-the-curve that everyone started giving Kannada cinema an importance that it always merited. This crowd funded, genre shattering feature about a mystery drug that induces multiple personalities within oneself was a runaway success. His new movie is a fairly gripping horror story about vigilante justice being wrought upon those who commit traffic violations on a particular flyover in Bengaluru.
Shorn of any adornments of his previous movie, Kumar follows a linear narrative and succeeds mostly on account of its outlandish plot that is deftly executed on screen. Shraddha Srinath's character of an intrepid newspaper reporter trying to get to the bottom of the case is functionally good. Despite its hurried climax, here's a horror movie that delivers more chills than any daiquiri.
Kammati Paadam: Rajeev Ravi, Anurag Kashyap's favourite cinematographer, is three films old as a film maker. Kerala is his wunderkammer. He showed Kochi at its resplendent best in Annayum Rasoolum, Thiruvananthapuram got its majestic due in Njan Steve Lopez and Ernakulam's verdancy is to be seen in his latest. While toggling between past and present, Dulquer Salmaan's character narrates how an eponymously titled gang of hooch makers ruled the roost in Ernakulam until the law of averages caught up with them. The protagonist's attempt to piece together the disappearance of his friend-turned-foe (a spry Vinayakan) provides the narrative thrust. Also, let's appreciate Salmaan for working on an average of four movies in a year, a work ethic we don't see any more in the current crop of actors.
Ravi showed the bylanes of Ernakulam in the same vein as the Kowloon area in Chungking Express. When grim, each shot looks like an Edward Hopper painting, only accentuated by a star cast that is stellar to say the least. The first 60 minutes are an absolute romp. Two scenes really stuck with me in this often grimly rollicking movie: the Michael Jackson dance done by a younger version of Vinayakan (the energy reminded me of the Rihanna track in Girlhood) and the rock ballad of a background score during a fight in the prison. Ravi might not be a perfect film maker but in a perfect world his movies would be earning Rs 100 crore at the box office instead of that steaming pile of horse waste called Housefull 3. C'est la vie!
jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in
